Jeff Vrabel: Cereal killer targeting Cap'n Crunch?

Jeff Vrabel

Monday

Mar 28, 2011 at 12:01 AMMar 28, 2011 at 11:35 PM

Last month, rumors began circulating that Quaker company was quietly planning to plunge Cap'n Crunch to the bottom of Davy Jones' soggy, milky locker, in the interest of making their oversugared, nautical cartoon-promoted products "healthier" or some such liberal Michelle Obama whimpering. This was the first report, anyway.

Happy spring break, everyone! Hope you all had/are having warm, froofy-drink-filled vacations and/or forced furloughs. Sit back, put your feet up and inhale a few more precious moments of clear-eyed fiction before you return to the unfettered horror that has become everyday life, the drive back to which will cost you $2,400 in gas.

Indeed you are probably going to want to return to whatever blissful malt-liquor induced haze you just reluctantly emerged from, because everything out here on planet America is, as is so often the case, worse than ever: Gas prices are ohthisisweird forehead-slappingly high again, the country's largest corporation, G.E., pays exactly zero in American taxes in an inexplicable tongue-unrolling hilarity which will be humiliatingly justified by most of your boring GOP presidential losers ("Obamacare!" Tim Pawlenty will shout to an empty Elks Lodge), you have to pay to read NEWSPAPERS online now and though your public school hasn't the remotest hope of "fixing those bus exhaust problems" or "replacing those teachers," we've magicked up several billion dollars of bomb money for that 45th war going on in, I think it was Madagascar? Kazakhstan? Whatever. It's brown on my globe.

And yet, in an age where daily soul-crushing reports of untethered greed and corporate power drive the nation's economy, one hideous headline stands apart: They're getting rid of Cap'n Crunch.

Well, maybe, anyway. Last month, rumors began circulating that Quaker company was quietly planning to plunge Cap'n Crunch to the bottom of Davy Jones' soggy, milky locker, in the interest of making their oversugared, nautical cartoon-promoted products "healthier" or some such liberal Michelle Obama whimpering.

This was the first report, anyway. The second came from pro-Crunch rebels, who began issuing statements that rumors of the Captain's demise were premature, which I know because the sheer volume of Google results relating to this particular controversy is depressing on an almost molecular level.

And then — and here's where it's gonna get hard to type due to the tears streaming down my face — Cap'n Crunch opened a Twitter account, where he confirmed that he will, in fact, be sticking around. "No Nick, I'm not leaving!" he replied via tweet to some inveterate loser named Nick. "I just returned from a trip away at sea and now I'm meeting my fans through social media." (On the plus side, he only has about 1,000 followers. In order to get serious numbers he'd have to beat up some prostitutes and star in a horrible sitcom.)

It's hardly news that cereal makers have been urged to try to pull back a little on the marauding tap-dance they're doing on kids' teeth. Last year, PepsiCo, which owns Quaker, said it would reduce added sugar per serving by 25 percent over the next 10 years, because apparently it takes two presidential election cycles to adjust the impenetrably convoluted process of making a puffy cereal.

To get to the bottom of this, I visited the newly launched Cap'n Crunch website, the time for which I am very much deducting next year, and found the question "What is the nutritional value of Original Capn' Crunch?" And here is what the Captain has to say:

"Cap'n Crunch is a great-tasting cereal which supplies grains, an excellent source of seven essential vitamins, is low in fat, cholesterol-free, has 0 grams of trans fat, and contains 1 gram of fiber. When consumed with milk and some fruit or 100% juice, it can be part of breakfast that helps kids start the day." See? THAT SETTLES IT! When consumed with fruit, it provides a decent serving of fruit.

(This Twitter feed, incidentally, just doesn't stop. "Hey Quinton, I'm good friends with Quisp and King Vitamin. We hang out all the time," Cap'n Crunch writes to what I desperately hope is a barely conscious stoner named Quinton. "It makes a great afternoon snack doesn't it!" he writes to iStantheMan, who, we can assume, keeps a running thread of his afternoon snacks on his own electrifying Twitter feed.)

So apparently the Captain isn't going anywhere, which is OK, because it he did he would certainly be replaced by something containing sugar content high enough to liven up a horse, something containing the world “Chocotastic” that, with an average-powered microscope, you can actually watch eating away at your children’s gumlines. I guess on the plus side, they'd have to at least pay taxes on it.

Jeff Vrabel will lose his mind if he ever reads anything similar about Count Chocula. He can be reached at http://jeffvrabel.com and followed at http://twitter.com/jeffvrabel.

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